I’d like to recommend reading this article on Greece, by Robert Kaplan. It sums up masterfully the country’s past and present; its contrasts, successes and failures throughout history. It examines the consequences of Greece’s unique positioning between East and West – where geopolitics and geography are one and the same – and whose clearly destabilising effect has endured down through the centuries.

“Is Greece European?”, by Robert Kaplan:

Greece is where the West both begins and ends. The West — as a humanist ideal — began in ancient Athens where compassion for the individual began to replace the crushing brutality of the nearby civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The war that Herodotus chronicles between Greece and Persia in the 5th century B.C. established a contrast between West and East that has persisted for millennia. Greece is Christian, but it is also Eastern Orthodox, as spiritually close to Russia as it is to the West, and geographically equidistant between Brussels and Moscow. Greece may have invented the West with the democratic innovations of the Age of Pericles, but for more than a thousand years it was a child of Byzantine and Turkish despotism. And while Greece was the northwestern bastion of the anciently civilized Near East, ever since history moved north into colder climates following the collapse of Rome, the inhabitants of Peninsular Greece have found themselves at the poor, southeastern extremity of Europe.